Alex Cockain, a British sociologist who has taught in China, starts his book with an interesting premise: to conduct interviews with a group of young Chinese to counter the “heady, febrile, seemingly intoxicated language of superlatives [which] has become the standard lexicon to describe Chinese urban areas” (p. 23). In a nicely structured account, he examines three contexts in which young people (meaning those in their late teenage years and early twenties) live their lives in China: the macro, micro and mediated spaces. The macro context starts with urban neighbourhoods, covers the tensions of city living, and assesses the nature of youthful connections to the nation and world. Cockain cautions against assumptions that the demolition of old city housing and the wholesale move to modern high-rises cause resentments from those involved. Better living conditions do not mean disconnection from new neighbours. For the young, life in big cities encourages caution about strangers and an emphasis on the security of home and parents. Cockain's informants are not obsessed with foreign countries, they cannot distinguish between the Communist Party, nation or state, and they are pragmatic about their identification with their homeland.

In the micro context, Cockain examines relations with parents and young people's attitudes to education, including the gaokao university entrance examination. Here again he discovers feelings of security and pragmatism, rather than frustration and resentment. “Informants were typically intensely reliant upon parents, and commonly felt incapable of acting independently” (p. 90). Relations with parents are relational rather than oppositional, empathetic rather than hostile. School provides comfort and safety from the world outside.

In the third, mediated context, Cockain examines some of the behaviour of his subjects in using traditional media and the internet. His informants once again take a pragmatic view of the latter, with a mix of idealized views of connection and belonging alongside fear and suspicion. The greater tendency of young men (compared to young women) to present themselves on homepages in ways discrepant from their real-life personalities is noted. A final chapter, “Online carnival,” starts with eleven “snapshots” from the internet in the first decade of this century, including Hu Ge's “Death by Mantou” parody and other more notorious videos. Cockain observes that young people are able to express things online that would be disapproved offline, a not unexpected conclusion. This rather predictable emphasis fills the Conclusions, with somewhat obvious observations that old and new co-exist and that young people “are generally happy to be protected from themselves and from others” (p. 163). End matter includes brief bio-data on the interview subjects, a glossary of Chinese terms, and a bibliography that renders the relatively few Chinese-language print sources into English titles like the rest of the sources, giving no indication that they are in Chinese.

Cockain bases much of his assessment of young Chinese attitudes (there is relatively little here about behaviour) on interviews with 31 young women and 12 young men (two of them are cousins). He also conducted focus groups, though rarely refers to them, and included five women in their later 20s and 30s and one man of 29. The author also draws on his experience with his Shanghai in-laws. Constructing a study (it still has the whiff of a doctoral thesis about it) on this basis seems perilous. The youngsters were all preparing to go abroad to study, mostly in Britain. An urge to please the British teacher with the potential ability to assist in their future plans cannot be discounted from these interviews and is not remarked on in the book. The group comes across as a bunch of nerds or swots, which might account for some of the emphasis on security and safety throughout the analysis. There is no mention, for example, of idols or fandom in these chapters, which seems astonishing. Many of the answers that Cockain has elicited from his student-subjects do not seem distinctive to youth at all. One of the student-subjects reports on an interview with her grandfather, who is quoted by her as saying “of the period before, and shortly after, the formation of the PRC”: “We were guided by Confucius and Mencius and possessed and valued notions of diligence, patriotism and filial piety…” (p. 116). Such conservatism seems to run in the family. As a counter to current breathlessness in accounts of change in China, this book has considerable value. It should, however, be consulted with caution.